Clergy Reflections on Mental Health

  “I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry, God.” That’s the ritualistic mantra I made myself recite somewhere around age 10 every time I felt I sinned. It had to be said out loud, but in the rules I constructed, I left myself a loophole that allowed me to say it softly, under my breath, so I didn’t seem completely nuts to any friends who might have born witness to my sinning, which—to be safe—covered a wide range of behaviors, from taking three ketchup packets in the lunch line instead of the permitted two, to demonstrating a cavalier disregard for my mother’s back by stepping on sidewalk cracks.   For a period of my childhood, I was a slave to compulsions like that.   Thanks be to God, over time, I was able to reason myself out of them. It can be terrifying when you fall asleep during your bedtime prayers because your ritual for completing them has grown impossibly long and complex. When you realize in the aftermath, however, that none of the worst-case-scenarios the ritual was mea